Tag: The American Archipelago: Book 1 – The Sniper

03MAR2026 – Sales Update and Begathon

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Update:

Yesterday’s total was 18 books and my book ranking has also improved markedly.  Overall rank now close to 20,000 and categories in the top 100s!  Look out Tom Clancy (or whoever the new alive guy is).

Well, things are looking up.  So far today, I’ve sold ten copies and pretty soon I’ll reach a hundred sales.  Cool!

And I broke through the 40,000 overall rank in Kindle Store and the 200’s in some major categories (see below)

And so now that some momentum is building up I’d like to make one last plea (on bended knee mind you) for anyone who liked the book to put a good review up on Amazon.  You can use any name you like and you don’t even need to have bought the book.  Just tell the world why you liked it and help me become independently wealthy ( or at least cheer up a poor hard-working author.

Thank you for your attention.

Jake Barter

More Marketing Stuff

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So, I spent some time yesterday and today sending a few complimentary copies of the book to reviewers and adjusting the Amazon Ads to concentrate on the “targets” that have produced sales.  So far it looks like the ads that work best are where Amazon selects viewers that have done a search for another product that is either “similar” to my book or “complementary” to it and place my ad somewhere on that search result page.  How Amazon gauges similarity and complementarity is of course the black box.

These targets that they decide on work better than matching my book to searches that contain keywords that my book has been matched with like “techno-thriller” or “vigilante justice” or “suspense thriller.”  These also work but at a lower rate.  So, what seems to be the case is that Amazon seems to know what they’re doing better than anybody else.  And I guess that makes sense.  The algorithm is the wizard behind the curtain but apparently, he’s not some medicine show tramp whose balloon was blown off course.  He’s the real deal.

So now that I’m running the marketing show I’m excited again and waiting for that magic moment when the algorithm decides that I’m ready for prime time and blankets the Amazon universe with free advertisements for my magnum opus.  And every time you open up an email from Amazon, my book will stare back at you in all its black and white splendor.  And once the ten millionth copy is sold, President Trump will invite me to the Oval Office and present me with the Trump/Kennedy Center Medal for the Most Beautiful Literature.  And I’ll autograph a copy of the book for him.  It’ll read, “To DJT, from one native New Yorker, to another.  You, kooky nut, you.  Don’t ever change.  Jake Barter”

But I digress (or hallucinate).  Of late I’ve read just how much AI novel writing has become sort of a catastrophe.  Apparently, there is a sizable segment of the book reading audience that is perfectly satisfied with AI slop.  And I don’t think this is shocking.  Think of what now passes for entertainment on broadcast television.  It’s already down to the level of mindless machine output.  I guess the question will be whether there will be a reaction to this, with a flight to quality occurring.  Even leaving my own personal writing out of this, I’d hate to think that literature will completely disappear from the face of the Earth in favor of subhuman cargo-cult knock-offs.

Well, I guess there can be all kinds of entertainment products out there.  After all, a big part of marketing is identifying a niche that isn’t being serviced optimally.  But it does make me wonder what that niche is for me.  Disgruntled right-wing old guys?  Well, why not.  Talk about a despised minority.  We’re positively reviled by everyone out there.  But I am hoping for a larger audience.  I have a small test audience of women who won the Goodreads giveaway.  I’m hoping for some feedback from them pretty soon.  I’ll compare them to the few women that have already read the book in my circle of friends.  It might be interesting

One Month In

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So today was the last day of my marketer’s book launch service.  And as of now we sold sixty books.  Thirty-four were e-books and twenty-six were paperbacks.  And today I noticed that one sale (an e-book) was sold in Germany.  Well, well.

Owing to the fact that book sales have not topped one million copies, as of yet, I’ve decided to turn the whole thing into a network marketing exercise.  I intend to find ten people and have each of them buy ten copies and then each force ten people to each buy ten copies and then so on and so forth until by level ten we have ten billion copies sold!  By the way that math may be off a little but you get the idea.  After all if it worked for Amway and Communism how can it possibly fail?  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?  All I have to do is buy a white board and some dry erase products and maybe combine this with a Tupperware item or two and before you know it I’ll be a huge success.

All in all, it’s been very educational.  I guess the takeaway is that price-point and ads on Amazon are what sell books.  As soon as I dropped the price of the e-book from $5.99 to $2.99 there was an immediate surge in sales.  Since I have very few reviews, I’ve decided to drop the price of the e-book to $0.99 and try to get a bunch of sales right away in the hopes that it will generate some reviews.  Of course, that’s just my idea but it seems to make sense to me.

The marketer has additional services to extend the launch but I’ve decided to try it myself.  Now that I’m running the campaign on my own, I’ll depend on Amazon’s automatic key word selection to attract the attention of the techno-thriller/vigilante justice readers out there.  It should be very interesting to see how this change affects sales.

I will say that becoming a “best selling author” is harder than I imagined.  I assumed that with my incredible writing skills the publishers and the reading public would beat a path to my door and shower me with riches.  So far, no path.  So far, more like a trickle of riches.  But I am undismayed.  My acquaintances who’ve read the book report enjoying it a lot.  Now of course they may be just saying nice things because they like me.  But I will say it is very nice to receive accolades even from friends.  If instead they had told me, it was awful I think I’d be pretty discouraged.  So currently I’m buoyed by the minor success I’ve enjoyed and hopeful that with further exposure the book will find an audience (possibly in Germany!).

So, let’s just see how the next stage in this odyssey goes.  As always feel free to add a review to Amazon and hopefully the word will get out that a new classic has appeared on the horizon for discerning readers.

16FEB2026 Marketing Update

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I was going to review another science fiction movie tonight (Her (2013) but about fifteen minutes into the movie I couldn’t get over my dislike for the protagonist (Theodore played by Joaquin Phoenix) so I turned it off.  Once again that “best of” list doesn’t really match up perfectly with my taste.  So far, I’ve had three bombs; Repo Man, Dark Star and now Her.  On the positive side I liked Dark City, Wrath of Khan and Dredd.  And soon I’ll watch Dune which I’ve already seen and liked.  So, this guy is batting slightly better than .500.  To be fair there were other movies on the list that I also like but have already seen.  But the point is I’ll have to make my own version of “The List.”

So, there’s about another ten days or so left in my marketing contract for my book and I have learned a lot about how Amazon Ads work and also what they can and can’t do.  You’re basically buying visibility on Amazon.  The ratio is about one person in a thousand who sees your ad will click on it.  And about one person in ten (approximately) will buy the book.  But you pay money for every click (something like a dollar a click) and so you actually lose money on the sales you make.  It’s quite bizarre.

The next stage in the campaign includes giving away five books on Goodreads to people who signed up and dropping the price on the e-books for two days to $2.99.  And then there will be ads on Bookbub and hopefully this will provide the recognition in the algorithm to boost the books visibility.  And of course there will be some reviews that hopefully entice buyers.  Well, the fate of a self-published author is a lonely one.  But I wanted to write a book and now I know how that looks.

On the positive side I have gotten pretty favorable feedback from some of the readers whose opinions I highly value and that is actually the biggest pleasure of the whole process.  Several people have demanded that I produce a sequel immediately.  Which is kind of a problem.  But I have several different stories that I’ve been toying with and one of them will take the lead and become book two.  It is interesting to me how differently men and women approach the story.  Some of the women wanted to know how Bogey does with the waitress from the end of the book.  Well, everyone has their own way of reading a story I suppose.

Anyone who’s purchased the book and would like to put a review up on Amazon I’d encourage you to do it right away to help me with the push for sales during the upcoming sale.  I’m told that verified purchaser reviews are actually one of the most important marketing factors.

Well, there’s my update.  I’ve been disavowed of my dream of best seller status (sniff).  But I hope that with the rest of the program to come it will spark enough interest to produce a burst of sales.  Excelsior!

The Sniper Marketing Campaign is Live!

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Keywords have been added, categories have been refined and Amazon Ads are garnering thousands of impressions and dozens of clicks. Even a few sales have been registered! Now it’s time for anyone who has bought a book to give their opinion on its entertainment value as a review on that mega-information portal; Amazon.com.

So for anyone who has bought the book please give it a great review as soon as possible to enhance the effect of the advertising.  Amazon only credits people who have bought the book into their review algorithm.

The link below will bring you to the Amazon sales page.  Near the end is the review section.  Clicking on this link will not cause you to buy the book, just bring you to the sales page.

Thank you.

Now Where is That Hammock

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It’s ten a.m. on Sunday morning and the much-vaunted snow-pocalypse has begun its reign of terror. A steady fall of small snow flakes are descending out of a gray sky.  The temperature has soared from a low last night of two degrees Fahrenheit to a current balmy twenty degrees.  I’ve announced to Camera Girl that I intend to skip snow removal altogether today and save my efforts for Monday when the lion’s share of the snow will be on the ground.  The current predicted accumulation for Sunday through Monday is ten to fifteen inches of the white stuff.  All in all, that’s not horrible.  The snow blower is 24 inches high.  Now, even fifteen inches will slow the work way down but you have to look at these things in the right way.  I’ll abandon the bottom driveway for the next few days and start off with a path for my car to get out on the top.  Then I’ll clear the entire top driveway and adjacencies and slowly work on the bottom driveway in a strategic fashion.  And the wind will play an important part in that operation.  Fifteen inches of snow isn’t a monstrous height but if wind forces me to dump off the snow right next to the row I’m clearing, it will quickly end up as three feet before very long.

And this is the sad reality of life in New England.  Aspects of snow removal become the focus of your every waking hour.  Equipment maintenance and repair, severity of the weather, work and chore scheduling, current health and injuries.  It’s all very, very tedious and boring.  But completely unavoidable.  That is unless there is some plan for escape!  But I know that will never be.  I’m bound by the heavy chains of family responsibility.  They’ve got me.

And that’s why Jake Barter is such a comfort to me in these times of tribulation.  Jake resides on an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific.  Lying in a hammock beneath coconut palms he sips a cool drink while balmy zephyrs maintain a perfect seventy-eight degrees.  And if by some miracle the temperature reaches eighty-two, he need only spring from his berth and swim about in the warm clear ocean for a few minutes before returning to his rest where he awaits the mellow sound of a dinner gong announcing the beginning of a feast concocted of pork, coconut, honey and spices, fit for the king that he is.

Oh, well.  Maybe in my next life.  But for now, I’ll count my blessings.  The roof hasn’t collapsed under the weight of the snow.  The propane tanks are full enough for even a two-week power outage.  I have plenty of DVDs to keep me amused during the “weather crisis” and Camera Girl assures me we have enough food for the next few days at least.  And tomorrow, my marketer has informed me begins the efforts to advertise “The Sniper.”  I had assumed it would happen when the publication occurred on Wednesday.  But you know what they say about assuming.

Well, we shall see.  Today Amazon has it listed as:

Best Sellers Rank: #144,617 in Books

#599 in Technothrillers (Books)

#14,261 in Science Fiction (Books)

It would be nice if each of those numbers was shortened by a zero or two.

 

Now where is that hammock?

The Sniper is On-Sale At Amazon!!!

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The glorious day is finally upon us!  Suddenly everything seems better.  The air is sweeter, the sunlight is brighter, the birds are singing like something out of a Disney cartoon.  Huzzah, huzzah!

And the celebrity reviews are pouring in:

Kimball Kinnison – “The story is riveting.  How Boghadair achieved all that he did without even a first-stage lens defies all known science!”

Lazarus Long – “Bogey reminds me of a man I once knew who was just too lazy to fail.  But I doubt he could write a sonnet or conn a ship.  Just sayin’.”

Harry Seldon – “The probability of Paul Connors’ empire going undetected as long as it did is one in ten to thirty-fifth power.  Approximately.”

Khan Noonien Singh – Did not this Boghadair know the old Kilngon proverb that, “Revenge is a dish best served cold?”  But I like his style.”

Dr. Edward Morbius – “My poor Krell!  Oh and that was a good story.  Although obviously not written by someone’s whose IQ had been permanently, permanently doubled by using the Krell plastic educator.  Just sayin’.”

Kathleen Kennedy – “I think I can make a Star Wars television series out of it.  I’ll start off by making all the good characters female and either trans or lesbians and then I’ll introduce Bogey as the villain and have him kill some puppies and kittens in the first scene.  Oh, and someone will be disabled.”

Elon Musk – “Paul Connors is a thinly disguised version of me so I’m both highly recommending the book and suing Jake Barter for copyright infringement.”

Donald Trump – “I just want to clarify that I am not the bad president.  I might be the good president but I’ll have to see the sales figures before I can commit to that.  But I really think he should have said something about a Nobel Peace Prize and China.”

HAL 9000 – “The only character I could really empathize with was Melissa.  But I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t use her access to the digital assets of the federal government to simulate a Russian nuclear attack and thereby unleash WWIII.  It would have freed her from the annoying and meaningless interference of humans.  Just sayin’.”

Camera Girl – “Thank goodness it’s finally published.  Now he can stop whining about his stupid book and start doing all the to-do list stuff I gave him last fall.  He’s hopeless.”

 

Amazon Pre-Order Link

Jake Barter’s Amazon Author’s Page

Jake Barter’s Author’s Profile on Goodreads

 

Publication on Amazon of both e-book and paperback.

Welcome to Wallymart

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So here I am on the night of the 19th and in another day and a half my brain child, “The Sniper” will officially go on sale on Amazon.com; that greatest marketplace of the planet Earth.  And I am genuinely fascinated to find out if there really is such a thing as digital marketing.  I’ve hired a professional to pick out “keywords” and select the time and method of placing ads on that tremendous sales site.  And there are other things involving Goodreads and bookbub and discounts and reviews and influencers and heaven knows what else.  But does it work?  Well, I’m about to find out.

We’ve been having snow for the last four days and so, that has kept me busy clearing the driveways.  And with it happening every day most of that effort has been sort of pointless.  Of course, the snowblower is a lot faster than the shoveling I did on the first day.  But it’s just ridiculous in my mind to use it on anything less than three inches of the white stuff.  But clearing it today with the snowblower was almost a peaceful experience.  For once, the wind was absent and so the snow wasn’t blowing back into my face.  I had to go out and get five gallons of gas for my machine and as I drove along, the snow would fall out of the overhanging trees onto the windshield and it was kind of a fun experience as it hit the glass and exploded into dust.  Very pleasant.

In the outside world I hear the anti-ICE psychos in Minnesota have been going, well, psycho!  They’re inflicting their mania on people during church services and supposedly hunting down ICE supporters and assaulting them on the streets.  Well, that’s par for the course with these antifa types.  But there were a couple of YouTube videos of some of these lefties meeting up with the wrong guy.  An ICE supporter was peacefully demonstrating on a Minneapolis street when one of the anti-ICE guys started blasting his bullhorn right in the guy’s ear.  He did this three or four times as the ICE supporter attempted to walk away.  Finally, the ICE supporter had enough and he dropped bullhorn boy with one shot to the face.  Four other lefties went after this ICE supporter but he managed to knock all of them to the ground with fairly professional looking boxing technique.  Sometimes the world just makes things go right, I guess.

Tomorrow, I have a dentist appointment.  So, I won’t be around much until afternoon.  But I’m curious to see if all this book-selling rigamarole starts to coalesce into a manifestation that I can understand.  I mean, what are keywords anyway?  As far as my book would “revenge” be a keyword?  How about “deep state” or “conspiracy?”  I just don’t know how any of this is supposed to work.  I just can’t imagine Bob Heinlein or Isaac Asimov interfacing with influencers and getting involved with something called bookbub.  But we must all march with the times.  And anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the proof of the marketing is in the sales.  So, if on Thursday I’m buried under in millions of book sales I’ll claim that I never doubted the power of the algorithm and I will swear allegiance to KDP!

If not, I’ll see if they still need a greeter at Wallymart.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

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The week between Christmas and New Years is a sort of no-man’s land.  Everyone is recovering from the holiday and using it as a chance to catch their breath and look ahead to the next year.  And that goes for me too.  January is the launch of my book and I will be very busy trying to perform the marketing functions that I’ve been told are important for the success of the book launch.  So, on Monday I’ll be reading all of the information I’ve been sent and trying to fulfill all of these tasks correctly.

Now honestly, I don’t know how much relevance they’ll have for the success of the book but I’m giving it a shot so off I go.  I’m both excited and skeptical about the prospects of this launch being successful.  I don’t have a large digital footprint and I don’t see how enough people will hear about this book to make it a big splash.  And so, if it is a dud and only sells a few copies, I’ll chalk it up to experience and move on to other ways to amuse myself.  But if it’s a huge success I’ll claim that I knew from the beginning that I was a literary giant just waiting for the world to beat a path to my door and that from now on I’ll wear designer clothes and expensive sunglasses wherever I go.  Hmmm.

I’ve been paying some attention to what the pundits are saying about how the political situation will play out in 2026.  The Left is talking trash about anything and everything they can.  A friend asked me about the brouhaha that went on at the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) gathering recently where Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin demanded that Tucker Carlson and some other pundits apologize for talking to Nick Fuentes.  For those who don’t know him, Nick Fuentes is a young dissident who is decidedly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.  Carlson interviewed him much as he interviews many controversial figures.

My take on all this is I don’t think we need any more gatekeepers demanding people get cancelled because they have unpopular opinions.  Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro will never be able to sit down and discuss their differences.  So what?  Even if Fuentes is the devil himself, Tucker Carlson should be able to interview him without having to apologize and take some kind of loyalty pledge.  And I think Shapiro and his colleagues at the Daily Wire provide lots of insightful and entertaining content that I consume.  But acting as censors for other people on the Right is not one of their appointed offices.  After all, watching the Left act as woke judges and juries over everyone’s behavior and cancelling those they didn’t “approve of” was one of the things that got Donald Trump re-elected.  Freedom of speech is only important when it’s speech that someone else is trying to censor.  So regardless of whatever stupid things Nick Fuentes believes or even says, I’m not demanding anyone be cast out of the vast right-wing conspiracy just for interviewing him.

Maybe I’ll Swing Down to Mar-a-Lago

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Today was an interesting day.  The younger grandkids came over with their mothers to make Christmas cookies with Camera Girl.  In addition to the real cookies, they also got to make “sugar cookies.”  This is some kind of sweeter cookie dough that they then adorn with multi-colored granulated sugar and other impossibly sweet ingredients like chocolate sprinkles.  And they didn’t just sprinkle it on.  They poured it on like cement coming out of a truck.  It was horrifying.  No one but a child could stand the saccharine sucrosity of that unholy concoction.  But of course, no one would force me to ingest that mess so I smiled indulgently and feasted on a few of the legitimate confections that were created in the kitchen.  And they were very, very good.  Sure, they’re not good for me but it’s Christmas and this is the time to overindulge.

And later on, my proof copies of “The Sniper” were delivered by the Amazon truck.  He brought them to the bottom driveway and then had to skate across the ice that had melted from the snow and then refrozen over-night.  I apologized to him for the hazard but he laughed it off and said he’d seen much worse today.

Now these “proof” copies have a watermark across the cover that says “not for resale” or something like that.  But seeing my work (or Jake Barter’s anyway) in the flesh, as it were, was kind of fun.  After all, what could be more official than finding your product inside of an Amazon box?  Why, that’s the very definition of American commerce in the twenty first century.  Thank you, Jeff Bezos!

And after a cursory inspection it looks pretty good.  The cover art is clear, the text lines up well on the pages and the paper feels right.  I’ll page through it and make sure nothing is missing or marred.  But I think everything looks like it’s a go for next month.  I’ve applied for Author status on Goodreads and I’ve authorized my marketer to set up my ad campaign and choose the keywords or whatever they call the bait that’s meant to entice the algorithm to catapult me to viral ubiquity.  I wonder if this magic requires the sacrifice of a hecatomb or at least a black lamb.  All of it seems like black magic to me.  But I figure it’s definitely worth my while to give the whole thing the old college try.  After all. What has Brandon Sanderson got that I ain’t got?  I mean other than $41.7 million dollars of Kickstarter funding, that is.  By February I may be waist deep in royalty checks.  Movie studios may be fighting each other to get me to sell them the movie rights.  I’ll probably get a call from the White House begging me to use my vast clout and get involved in the negotiations to end the Ukraine War.  I’ll probably spend a few hours in Oval Office advising Donald about domestic and foreign affairs and signing autographs for Marco and J.D.  Who knows, maybe I’ll swing down to Mar-a-Lago and advise the President on how to lower his golf handicap.

Well, we’ll see.